we're spinning again and again and again
by Agent of the Apothecary
Summary: Modern AU, the growth of Georgiana Darcy. // “It’s like home,” she says, “only a home that’s changed after you’ve returned. It’s like coming home to something that isn’t what it used to be.”


**Story:** we're spinning again and again and again

**Summary:** What's your crime. // "It's like home," she says, "only a home that's changed after you've returned. It's like coming home to something that isn't what it used to be."

**Notes:** Born out of the misguided desire to give Georgiana some maturity and Wickham a heart. Because they're both really just little children. Compatible with _Being of True Love and Reality and Other Fairy Tales_. Once again, you actually have to have read P&P for parts of this to make sense.

**Disclaimer:** Jane Austen holds all the cards.

* * *

"Hi," he says.

It is not the beginning of an epic love affair, and Georgie isn't really the type to put much value in modern romance, but as his smile tweaks up towards his eyes she grins back and says, "Hi," and feels like life is lifting her up by wings.

"George," he says, giving her his hand.

"Georgie," she replies, and they laugh. He has the most beautiful laugh she has ever heard in her life.

"It's nice to meet you, George-y," he says, and ruffles his hair, not looking away from her eyes. "I've got to go, but—I'll see you around?"

She watches him leave, which is how she knows that he turns back and looks at her as he walks out the door. He's either the most accomplished seducer this side of Casanova, or there's something a little honest in him.

When she talks to Will on the phone five months later, she prefers to think the latter (because the former is just too painful to contemplate) (and Georgie, despite her naivete, is not the worst judge of character).

"Do you want me to come down and get you?" Will asks, and he may be impatient and older and terrifying on his good days, but he does care.

"No," says Georgie, curled up in her bean-bag chair with her knees under her chin. Will huffs through the phone, and the most expensive of technologies assure that she hears it with perfect clarity. "I think—I'm going to be okay."

* * *

"Do you like Indian?" George asks when she picks up, and the first thing she can think to say is:

"How did you get this number?" _Lame, Georgie_, she thinks, but she decides to go with it as she shifts her textbooks to her other arm. Across the hall, Marianna gestures to her watch and points frantically at the doorway.

"I have my ways," he says, only he doesn't sound dark and seductive enough to pull it off, so she doesn't feel bad about laughing. He affects mock disapprobation, as his next comment is along the lines of, "I'm sorry, do you find me amusing?"

"Sure," she says, laughter saturating her voice so that she sounds older and happier and Marianna forsakes her for the class that Georgie is definitely going to be late for, at this point. "I like Indian."

"Eight o'clock," he says. "I'll find you."

And the surprising thing is—he does. If Georgie were more outgoing, she would accuse him of stalking her, but as is she settles for a horrid blush that races across her nose and cheeks, and shoves her hands into the pocket of her wool coat, drawing the fabric around her. She is shy and feels twelve years old and scuffs the toe of her winter boots against the pavement, hiding behind a swing of her short hair.

"Hi," she says, and her breath crystallizes and expands in the air.

"Hey yourself," he says. "I hope you really, _really_ like Indian food. Because I'll have you know that I am the master of the curry."

"That's what _you_ think," says Georgie, thinking of her brother, only he takes it as a challenge and grins at her, and he's probably getting the wrong impression, but Georgie is too happy to correct him on it.

"You have no idea what I think," he murmurs, and she starts blushing again.

* * *

He finds an old, cheap bottle of red wine and they curl up in the matching bean-bags that Marianna has kindly vacated for the night, eating microwave pizza and watching movies on her laptop. He tells her that he likes _Dr. Zhivago_ and _Casablanca_, but she was always more of a Sandra Bullock fan, so they find a happy medium in a couple Fred and Ginger classics.

"They seem very happy," she says, partially to herself and partially to him, and when he looks at her, mouth turned into an upside-down U by contemplation, it takes him a few seconds to realize what she is talking about.

"Being happy is kind of a necessary ending to these things," he says, and he sounds a bit stiff about it. Like he doesn't like happy endings.

"That's not always bad," counters Georgie in a small voice, and she takes a choking sip of her glass of almost-vinegar red wine (she's had better vintages and older ones and prettier ones, but this one, laced with the threat of a headache and the roundness of fake cheese, feels like Adulthood) as he considers this, staring at the screen.

Fred and Ginger tap tap tap their way across it, an arc of white in the brilliance of the screen, and he says, "I guess," before he tangles his fingers in her short, cute-girl hair and kisses her, the wine a dashed line across his mouth.

When he tells her that he doesn't believe in happy endings, he sounds about five years old. "It's not the ending that's important," says Georgie, her hair mussed and frizzy from his fingers and the static in the small dorm room.

"Learn that at private school?" he asks her, and doesn't give her a chance to answer before her nicks the last slice of pizza and they battle it out over a couple of dried-up pieces of pepperoni. She doesn't remind him that she never told him she went to private school, and he doesn't say anything about the fact that she looks like an angel.

* * *

Sometimes he waits for her outside of her classes; she'll emerge from Early Vocal Diction or her ensemble practice on Thursdays and he'll be slouched against a pillar or reading a book or doing both, listening to music from artists that even she hasn't heard of, just—waiting.

Music is the one thing they can agree and disagree on, and she invites him to her concerts and he takes her to underground clubs and slouchy bars. She lectures him on Amy Beach and he tells her about a friend with a flamenco guitar; with him, things get _said_. Will has always encouraged her to have an opinion, but George pushes it—"Why?" he asks her, when she tells him that Chopin makes her cry.

She blinks at him a few times. "Because it's _beautiful_," she says.

"So?" he retorts, and he sounds almost angry. "You're beautiful, and you don't make me cry. It has to be more than that."

"I—I," she stammers, caught between the compliment and the violence of him, his eyes narrowed and his head bowed over hers. "It's like home," she says, "only a home that's changed after you've returned. It's like coming home to something that isn't what it used to be. It's always moving."

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh. Okay."

They never discuss Chopin again, but there are others—Elgar's cello, Mahler's fifth symphony, how Shostakovich makes her angry at the world—and—Paco de Lucia's undisputed genius, the dissolution of Pearl Jam, his unswerving hatred for techno—that fill up the hours that they spend together.

When Marianna's new boyfriend asks how long they have been dating, Georgie tells him four months even though it does not feel like they are _dating_ as much as constantly raging a battle against what he won't tell her and the honesty he forces out of her. She doesn't know if he has any sisters or brothers or what his parents are like or what he does between when he leaves her dorm and appears outside of one of her classes.

She does know—when he's frustrated he plucks the air with the fingers of his left hand positioned like he's holding a pick; his hair and hers are the same color but his is softer and thicker and more volatile; he kisses the inside of her elbow and licks the back of her neck but won't sleep with her.

"Why?" she asks, for once, and he considers his plate of spaghetti and the Chianti bottles hung from the ceiling and the chipped polish on her right thumb, before replying.

"Every time you say something, I realize that I don't know you as well as I thought. And I won't sleep with you until I do."

It's not romantic and it's not epic (it's actually kind of a lame excuse), but she accepts it because she is addicted to him and what he knows and what he unearths inside of her, like an anthropologist.

* * *

"What was private school like?" he asks her, sprawled across her bed and watching her research a paper. He is bouncing a rubber ball against the ceiling, and the _thwunk_ is comfortingly a ¾ beat.

"War," she says, not really thinking it through. Her hair has grown out to the point where her curls are ugly rather than tempestuous, and she doesn't wear a lot of the pretty clothes Mrs. Reynolds bought for her, and her feet are bare and dirty, and she talks (a lot. Marianna complains).

He stops bouncing. "War?"

"We were a bit like soldiers," she says. "If you had problems, you didn't run to someone with them. If there were difficulties with the other girls, you bucked it up. If you were bad at something, you took private lessons until you got better."

When she looks at him, he is watching her with his brows drawn thickly over his eyes, the ball cupped in his hand across his stomach. "That sounds—"

"It was fine," interrupts Georgie crisply, returning to her paper. She stares at the page for a while, nibbling on the end of her pen, before adding, "It's entirely different, now."

"What is?" he asks.

"Life," she says. She sticks the pen between her lips and throws him a look from underneath her messy hair. He is no longer watching her, instead the ceiling and the grey smudges from the rubber of the ball, and she shrugs off the discomfort—a trick she learned at Miss Chavingham's—and opens up another reference book.

He moves before she realizes it, thumbs swirling across the back of her neck, his chin on the top of her head, and he hooks his foot in the leg of her chair and turns it around, trapping her between him and the desk.

For a very long moment, he looks her in the eye and then he winds the entire mass of her ugly, frizzing hair into a rope around his hand and presses his mouth against her chest where the white of her cotton bra peeks through the buttons of her shirt, and pulls her backwards, bending and arching her spine against his lips. She kicks off her pants and reaches for his shirt, but he keeps his hand around her hair, keeps her pulled like the string of a violin against her desk, and she doesn't move, except when he presses a cool hand against her stomach and she starts, violently.

He never kisses her mouth, which her literature teacher would find symbolic, and he untangles his hand from her hair and disappears, leaving Georgie with a cramp in her neck and a bruise in the small of her back from the edge of the desk. There are broken strands of her hair scattered over her notes.

"I didn't expect to like you," explains the voicemail she listens to the next morning. "I thought you were going to be a stiff-necked brat." In his exhale, she lets herself imagine things like _I'm sorry_ and _Maybe in another life_. "Goodbye, George-y. Give my love to your brother."

* * *

Even though she knows what is going to happen, she calls his phone and faces the brightly unsympathetic voice. _The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.

* * *

_

"Are you sure you don't want me to come down?" her brother asks.

"No," she says. She cuts her hair, but keeps the big shirts and the lost shoes and the scratchy voices on the CDs that he burned for her, with artists she has never heard of but words (souls) she can recognize.

(I'm going to be okay.)

* * *

_So . . . yeah. I realize that Wickham is a total douche, but apparently I felt the need to explore the effect such a douche would have on Georgiana. Thoughts? Was I completely off the mark?_


End file.
